The Polish city of Wilno (now Vilnius, in Lithuania) was the city of Czeslaw Milosz's youth and adolescence. In this collection of essays and reminiscences the Nobel Prize–winning poet traces an informal autobiography over the street map of an extraordinary city—a crossroads of languages, cultures, and beliefs—that is the foundation of his internal geography. Here are portraits of writers Aleksander Wat, Dwight MacDonald, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, as well as Swedish scientist Emanuel Swedenborg; an exchange of letters from the 1950s with novelist and diarist Witold Gombrowicz; and a selection of speeches delivered between 1967 and 1987, including Milosz's Nobel Lecture.